BAMOS Vol 31 Special Issue October 2018 Bulletin Vol 31 Special Issue 01 2018 | Page 15

Presentation summaries
and abstracts
BAMOS
Special Issue
New research for new services
Toward value-added weather and environmental predictions
Beth Ebert
Bureau of Meteorology
Weather agencies such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology
are branching out with new services designed to provide
energy, health, emergency services, and other sectors with
tailored information to assist them with their weather-related
decision making. Many of these new services are being built
in close partnership with the user community, combining
environmental information and the supercomputing capability
of the national weather service with information supplied by
the users. Current examples of where this is occurring here
in Australia include ensemble prediction of tropical cyclone
winds and waves for the offshore oil and gas industry, and
development of a new thunderstorm asthma forecasting system
to help health departments alert people with asthma and hay
fever to take protective action. The cross-disciplinary research
and information exchange required for these projects to
succeed is leading to improved understanding of how weather
information can be combined with other information to support
decisions which minimise damage to infrastructure, improve
public health outcomes, etc. Advances in communication
technology are enabling sharing of diverse data across sectors
and provision of forecasts through more interactive and user-
friendly applications.
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